Weekly Writ 11/6: Did ending the CASA boost NDP fundraising?
Conservatives, Liberals have strong Q3 results.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
The Weekly Writ is completed on Tuesday afternoons, so that was before the polls closed in the United States yesterday. Accordingly, this newsletter will be free of any discussion of the results of the U.S. presidential election — probably the only thing in your inbox this morning that can say that!
Fundraising figures for the third quarter of 2024 show the Conservatives are still raising more money than all of their rivals (combined), but most parties had a strong quarter as Canadians open up their wallets ahead of the next federal election.
The NDP was one of the parties that had a harder time of it. But it ended the quarter with a little momentum, suggesting that the breaking of the confidence-and-supply agreement with the Liberals might have gone over well with some of its donors.
Numbers filed with Elections Canada show the Conservatives raised $8,449,000 in July, August and September. That’s the party’s best Q3 on record outside of an election year, and an increase of 20% over the Conservatives’ fundraising in Q3 2023. The party has already raised $29 million this year. Over a full year, the Conservatives have only raised more money in 2015, 2019 and 2023.
The Liberals were well behind in fundraising at $3,322,000, but that is a decent haul for the party relative to its usual performance. This was the Liberals’ best non-election Q3 since 2018 and fundraising was up 10% over the party’s take in Q3 2023. The Liberals have raised $10.2 million so far this year. Outside of an election year, this is the Liberals’ best first nine months since 2016.
The New Democrats raised just $1,271,000 in the third quarter. With the exception of 2022, this was the NDP’s worst Q3 since 2018 and it is down 19% from Q3 2023. One problem for the NDP is that their base of donors has decreased. So far, the party is averaging 14,300 individual contributions per quarter. That’s the smallest number of contributions since 2010.
But it does seem that the party ended the quarter on a fundraising tear. Elections Canada only publishes the details of donations over $200, so we can’t track down when every dollar was donated to the party. But among those donors, the NDP raised $236,000 in September, nearly as much as it raised in July and August combined ($260,000).
In fact, September 4th, the day that the NDP announced it was ending the CASA with the Liberals, was one of the best fundraising days the party had throughout the quarter. An average day brought in $5,000 from donors giving at least $200, but the party raised more than three times that amount on September 4th.
Excluding the 15th and the end of each month, which is when it looks like monthly donors are charged by the party, September 4th was the NDP’s best fundraising day for the entire quarter — with one exception. The party raised a little more money on September 19th, the day when Jagmeet Singh had his outburst with Pierre Poilievre in the House of Commons (“I’m right here, bro!”). It also came just two days after Singh had his confrontation with an angry (and cowering) protestor on Parliament Hill.
We’ll have to wait another three months, but it will be interesting to see whether the NDP will be able to carry the fundraising momentum it had in September into the rest of the fall.
Rounding out the list, the Greens raised $380,000, their best non-election Q3 since 2020 and up 10% from the same quarter last year. The Bloc Québécois also had a good quarter, raising $356,000, their best Q3 on record and up 44% from this time last year.
The People’s Party appears to be on a downward trajectory. The party raised $202,000 over the quarter, their worst Q3 since before the 2021 election and down 26% from the same quarter last year. That was the biggest quarter-to-quarter drop of all the parties required to file quarterly.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on some missing votes in British Columbia, the B.C. Conservatives’ fundraising breakthrough, how the count has evolved in Saskatchewan and Danielle Smith’s thumbs-up from UCP members.
Polls still put the Conservatives in front nationally, plus we have some new numbers out of Nova Scotia.
Another Tim Houston majority if the election were held today.
Farmers choose a Conservative leader in Manitoba in the #EveryElectionProject.
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IN THE NEWS
Elections BC looks for ballots, Conservatives drum-up dollars
It’s been a rough few days for Elections BC, as the electoral authority announced that it had neglected to count a few ballots. Oops!
A box containing 861 ballots was not counted in Prince George-Mackenzie, an embarrassing oversight but not enough to impact the Conservatives’ 5,742-vote margin of victory.
More impactful are the out-of-district ballots cast in a handful of ridings, most notably in Surrey-Guildford. That’s the riding that flipped from the Conservatives to the NDP after the mail and absentee ballots were tallied, thereby giving the New Democrats their 47th seat and a majority government.
The riding was decided (at least, in the final count) by 27 votes. That lead has been whittled down to 21 votes after the missing ballots were counted. It’ll now go to a judicial recount.
It’s understandable that human error will cause some of these issues. Running an election is a gargantuan effort involving thousands of workers, many of them hired and trained for the election itself. That we don’t see these kinds of errors more often is surprising. And we should probably commend Elections BC for having the necessary processes in place to catch these errors, as well as for their transparency.
But in an age of misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding vote-counting, we need our electoral agencies to be perfect, or as close to perfect as they can be. Hopefully Elections BC will learn from this mistake to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Premier David Eby has promised to propose an all-party committee to look into the matter, which is a good start — as long as partisanship is kept out of it.
Meanwhile, quarterly filings with Elections BC show that the B.C. Conservatives raised a lot of money in the third quarter of the year in the run-up to the election.
The Conservatives led in fundraising for the quarter with $3,391,000, a remarkable haul considering that in the same quarter in 2023 the party barely raised $50,000. The Conservatives actually surpassed the NDP in fundraising, as the New Democrats took in $3,010,000.
The Greens raised $608,000, a respectable amount by their standards, while B.C. United bottomed out with $456,000. Much of the quarter was before Kevin Falcon announced he was withdrawing his party from the election and endorsing the Conservatives.
Clearly, the playing field has been leveled between the NDP and Conservatives. The two parties will also receive nearly the same amount of public subsidies, which are based on the number of votes received in the last election. The NDP benefited from having a more long-standing organization behind them in this campaign and they likely had more money. That won’t necessarily be the case in 2028.
Saskatchewan NDP won the mail vote, but unlikely to flip more seats
On Saturday, Elections Saskatchewan will complete the count for the October 28 election, tallying the final mail and special ballots that have yet to be counted.
Counting the initial pile of mail ballots did flip the riding of Saskatoon Westview from the Saskatchewan Party to the NDP, leaving the Sask. Party with 34 seats (only one of them in Saskatoon) and the NDP with 27 seats (all but two of them in Regina and Saskatoon).
The New Democrats performed well in the mail vote, winning it by a margin of 56.3% to 41.3% over the Sask. Party. That’s nearly a reversal of the result from the in-person voting, which went to the Sask. Party by a margin of 53% to 39.5%.
As many as 12,392 mail ballots remain to be counted. That’s the number of packages requested and sent out by Elections Saskatchewan that were not returned by October 26.
If all of those packages are returned, and if they split in the same proportion as the earlier mail vote, then the final result would be 52.1% for the Sask. Party and 40.6% for the NDP.
It’s unlikely, though, that those last ballots will flip more ridings.
Only in Saskatoon Westview and Saskatoon Willowgrove is the amount of unreturned mail votes greater than the margin between the two leading candidates. That margin is 37 votes in Saskatoon Westview, but the Sask. Party would have to win the remaining ballots by a margin of 20 points to take the seat — very unlikely when the NDP has performed so well in the mail vote.
In Saskatoon Willowgrove, the NDP would need to win the remaining uncounted ballots, assuming they are all returned, by a margin of 42 points over the Sask. Party. That’s also unlikely.
So, the final count will almost certainly be 34 seats for the Sask. Party and around 52% of the vote, with the NDP standing at 27 seats and nearly 41% of the vote.
ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS
In Alberta, it seems that Premier Danielle Smith has done something few of her right-of-centre predecessors have done before: satisfy her party’s membership. In the United Conservative Party’s convention over the weekend, Smith managed an impressive 91.5% support for her leadership. There had been chatter that the score could be much lower than that, but for now she seems to be well-aligned with the UCP’s often cantankerous base.
THIS WEEK’S POLLS
All Quiet on the Polling Front
With attentions turned to the United States over the last week, the federal polling front has been relatively quiet. There was an EKOS Research poll published showing a 13-point lead for the Conservatives (thanks in part to a tiny, wonky sample from the Prairies) and the usual update to the Nanos Research tracker, which shows Conservative and Liberal support reverting to the mean. The Conservative lead is back up to 16 points in the Nanos tracker after shrinking to 13 points last week.
These two polls do not mean that the Conservative lead has fallen to the mid-teens, as most other pollsters have not shown this kind of tightening. We’ll await more data before coming to any conclusions on whether or not things have moved at all the last few weeks (I wager that they have not).
The Poll Tracker continues to give the Conservatives a wide lead of 19 points, and puts the Conservatives on track for around 213 seats. The Liberals stand at around 57 seats, the Bloc at 43 and the NDP at 28.
My model is a little more bullish on the NDP’s chances than my friend Philippe’s, largely because my model awards the party more of the Liberals’ seats in some of the urban centres. But my floor is not much lower — if the NDP proves unable to flip many of the Liberals’ seats in these downtown cores and also fails to hold off the Conservatives in Northern and Southwestern Ontario and in the B.C. Interior, the party could have a very rough election.
Apart from the Conservatives, the Bloc is in the best position to gain seats. The party has picked up a little support in Quebec, but more importantly the Liberals have fallen back without the Conservatives moving forward much. The Bloc is poised to gain seats from the Liberals outside of Montreal but is not yet under threat of losing much to the Conservatives. If the Bloc makes those gains and the Liberals lose too many seats to the NDP in Toronto and Montreal, then the Bloc would have the inside track on the official opposition role.
POLLING NEWS BRIEFS
Mainstreet Research put out some new numbers for Nova Scotia. The regionals were paywalled, but the toplines how 50% for the PCs, 25% for the NDP and 22% for the Liberals. The results look more similar to the poll published last week by Abacus Data, which had the PCs well ahead than, the poll published by Liaison Strategies that had the PC lead over the NDP at just nine points.
IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY
I am running the CBC’s Poll Tracker with the seat projection and poll aggregation model I have developed over the last four federal elections (and multiple provincial campaigns in between). You can check out the Poll Tracker here. For this election, I am making the seat-by-seat projections available on The Writ here.
Very few changes this week, with the exception of the Saskatchewan NDP gaining one seat as a result of the mail ballots and an update to the projections for Nova Scotia. The change from last week there is primarily due to the implementation of a newer model closer to the version used in the Poll Tracker.
The seat estimates for provincial legislatures are derived from a swing model that is based on trends in recent polls as well as minor tweaks and adjustments. Changes are compared to last week. Parties are ordered according to their finish in the previous election (with some exceptions for minor parties)
UPCOMING BYELECTIONS
Yet to be scheduled
CA - Cloverdale–Langley City (to call by November 30)
AB - Lethbridge West (to call by January)
QC - Terrebonne (to call by March)
CA - Halifax (to call by March 2)
ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
R.G. Willis becomes Manitoba Conservative leader
November 6, 1919
Politics were in flux after the dislocations caused by the First World War. In Manitoba, the Conservatives had been ousted from office in 1915 despite the presence of Robert Borden’s Union (read: Conservative) government in Ottawa. The Manitoba Tories had been taken down by scandal and corruption, and were being supplanted by organized farmers’ movements.
When the party called a convention to name a new leader in 1919, the Liberals were solidly ensconced in power and the direction the Conservatives would take was still in question. Though a handful of candidates were nominated at the convention held in the Royal Alexandra Hotel in Winnipeg, including Albert Préfontaine, who was leading the Conservative caucus in the legislature, and Agnes Munro (called “Mrs. James Munro” in the newspapers), only two let their names stand for the party’s leadership.
The favourite seemed to be Fawcett Taylor. Born in Manitoba and a former mayor of Portage la Prairie, Taylor had served in the trenches in France and returned home intact and with the rank of major.
His opponent was Richard Gardiner Willis. Born in Ontario, like many others he had made his way to Manitoba in search of better opportunities. By 1919, he had served as mayor of the small town of Boissevain in Manitoba’s southwest, and was dubbed a “well-known farmer” in the Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs.
The “well-attended” convention included five delegates for each of Manitoba’s 49 ridings, along with other non-voting participants. When the votes were counted, Willis emerged as the winner — though by how much was not announced.
His win was seen as a demonstration of the growing strength of organized farmers’ movements in the Prairies. Willis himself seemed to recognize this, saying he had “no doubt that Manitoba’s next Legislature will comprise a great many more farmers than it does at present. There are only seven at present, and I confidently expect that this number will be more than doubled.”
“They may be Conservative, Liberal or Independent Farmers, but they will be farmers first of all.”
According to the Canadian Press, “much enthusiasm was shown and victory at the next election was confidently predicted.”
Those predictions proved optimistic. Not only would Willis lose his own bid to win a seat in the provincial election in 1920, the Conservatives would finish fourth in the legislature — behind the Liberals, Farmers and Labour.
But Willis was on to something. Tobias Norris’s short last term would end in 1922 and the United Farmers of Manitoba, soon to be styled the Progressives, would form a majority government that year. The Conservatives would finish third but, this time, Willis (now just a candidate as the leadership had passed to Taylor) would win himself a seat on the opposition benches — in a legislature full of farmers.
That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Numbers will be dropping on Friday. The episode will land in your inbox but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. If you want to get access to the weekly mailbag and other special episodes, become a Patron here!